FuzzyCo

Where all my Canucks at? What-what!

The Impress These Apes (2! Electric Boogaloo!) cast got together last week for an informational meeting and a little cast bonding. Bryan (aka Timekeeper Willis), who will be the "cast liason", ran us through some bonding exercises like "buying us beer" and "having us draw randomly-generated tattoos on each other with washable markers. Above is Studard with the "evil guitar" I drew on her.

We also got our first challenge -- write an autobiographical song that will introduce us to the judges and audience. We have to accompany ourselves by playing some sort of musical instrument. It's the same first challenge as last season, but they told us it'd be one of the few repeated challenges. For a trip down memory lane, here's Erica's entry for that same challenge. It's a lot to live up to.

Interviewed Michael Ian Black.

(I owe many thanks to Erica who transcribed the interview so that I wouldn't have to listen to the sound of my own voice.)

Dan has some theory that the bakery employees at Dominick's have nothing to do and so they pour their heart and soul into the cakes. I think they might just have a half-decent cake recipe. In any case, it's no Ace of Cakes, but this Hamburger Cake we took to JK's studio warming was both cute and tasty.

I can't get enough lolcats and so must make my own.

I'm signed up for the Chicago Marathon and I'm training by myself using the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer.

This is a book that comes out of a class at the University of Northern Iowa that is a joint class between a psychology professor and a phys. ed. professor -- the phys. ed. professor brings the training you need to complete a marathon and the psychology professor brings a lot of self-helpy stuff about the mental preparation you need to get through the training process and then the race itself. I'd make fun of the self-helpy stuff, except that it seems to be helping already. And the book is aimed squarely at the non-runner and getting you to complete a marathon. Not do it with a great time or lose a lot of weight or any other side goals -- simply complete a marathon. Since that's what I'm trying to do, it seems like the perfect training program for me.

You can follow along with my Marathon progress on my main blog, if you like.

For a movie based on toys, Transformers (or Transforme, as the marquee at the theater said) is a pretty good movie. I mean, it doesn't really make any sense, but it's funny and actiony and a number of actors have a lot of fun with their roles. I give it an A-, Erica gives it an A+.

For the last couple of years, my two-man improv group Bare has been performing more outside of Chicago than at home. And now that Shaun's in the UK for six months, we likely won't even be doing many shows anywhere. Which makes it an extra-extra special treat for all three Bare fans that we're doing a show tomorrow night (Saturday, July 7, 8pm) at the Playground. We're talking about bringing back Pageant of History -- though we're willing to take requests (Hotel? Small town? Who would do that? Actual Theatre?).

Mustang Repair and Homey Loves Chachi are performing on the same bill and all three groups will joining together to perform a Dream for a silent auction winner from the Playground's recent 10th anniversary celebrations.

According to my marathon training schedule, I was supposed to run 7 miles on 7/7/07. Instead, Shaun, who is in training himself for a half-Ironman, convinced me and Jin that it would be a good idea to re-do the 38 mile bike ride that he had missed because he was out of the country. So we did that yesterday and this morning we (plus the handsome and debonair Matt Larsen) ran 7 miles. I was not in the best of shape this morning -- in addition to the bike ride, I was also up late taking photos for the Belmont Burlesque Revue at their Martyrs' show -- but I keep telling myself that if I can survive these runs when I'm not feeling that great, imagine how easy it will be when I actually get some rest beforehand.

This weekend Greg Inda and I will be heading off to Salt Lake City Utah to meet up with Jose Gonzalez (and maybe Mark Jordan) of the Phoenix Neutrino Project for a whole mess of teaching and shows. We're going to be teaching workshops to two different casts on Friday and Saturday that will each culminate in a performance of a Neutrino Project improvised movie.

The Friday show will be preceeded by a Zombie March and feature a showing of my short film Zombies! and a performance by the Thrillionaires.

The Saturday show will feature a performance by my old friends JoKyR and Jesster and will be followed by an all-star Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard.

Details of performance times and locations are on The Slapstick Association's MySpace page.

(Also, that weekend is when I should be doing my 8 mile training run -- but I'm a little concerned since Salt Lake City is at 4,000 feet and it's supposed to be around 100°ree; this weekend. Maybe I'll wait until Sunday night when I'm back in ol' sea level Chicago.)

Here's something I've been working on: Silly Funny Goof Gang is a new Blewt project and I've been filming and editing these 'goofs'. Erica choreographed the title sequence, so there's some bonus Team Gerdes content for ya. We're calling this the 'pilot episode' and I think Steve will be entering it into a contest. But here it is already for your viewing pleasure.

In Erica and my on-going teen-performance film festival, we've seen a lot of bad movies. But High School Musical may be the worst. Now, admittedly, we're definitely not in the target audience for a Disney Channel made-for-tv movie, but even taking that into account it's still pretty terrible.

This whole training thing is kinda blowing my mind.

The previous times I've tried to pick up running I'd usually go out with a friend who was already a runner and stumble after them for 2 or 3 miles or whatever and come home completely exhausted, knees terribly sore, and swear off the whole endeavor as completely impossible. This time, I had that whole "pre-training" phase where I started out just going out for 3 mile walks with occasional jogging and worked up to jogging with occasional walks. Which makes all sorts of sense, even if I wasn't headed for a much larger goal.

And speaking of the road to that larger goal -- holy cow. Three-and-a-half weeks ago, 5 miles was a big freakin' deal. This morning, it was my easy run. I won't front, it started kinda rough, but by the time I hit the half-way mark and headed back home it felt pretty... good. Crazy, but true.

Our six hour (!) rehearsal/workshop went fine today, so I'm really looking forward to the show tomorrow.

Jose had a flat tire at 3:45 am outside of Page, Arizona, which led, as such things do, to a series of small adventures. He managed, in the end, to arrive halfway through the rehearsal and actually made cogent contributions -- far better than I would have done under similar circumstances.

Fuzzy Gerdes is really easy to find, but if any of my pre-college friends were trying to find me, they'd be looking for Erik Gerdes. So I thought I'd leave a little Google-bait here with some biographical info that might help people find me.

I'm not the one other Erik Gerdes in the U.S. who is now a doctor in Illinois and who went to Case Western Reserve. Neither am I any of the 16 Eric Gerdeses. But it probably doesn't hurt to put "Eric" on this page for people who can't remember how I spell my name.

I went to 3rd through 9th grades in Columbia, Maryland and attended Talbot Springs Elementary School, Owen Brown Middle School, and Hammond High School. If I had stayed in the US I would have been Class of 1988.

10th through 12th grades I went to Pembroke School in Kensington Gardens, South Australia. I attended one trimester at Adelaide University and then came back to the states and went to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. I graduated with a degree in computer science in Class of 1992.

Some friends of mine that I've tried to find, just to bait their names, include:
Cate Rogers
Danielle Poulos
Eric Fisher
James "Murph" Murphy

If I'm the Erik Gerdes you're looking for, you can email me or check me on MySpace or Facebook if that's more your speed.

XXX is such a terrible movie. And don't think I'm saying that because I'm some sort of snob who thinks an "extreme-sports star turned secret agent" movie is bound to be bad. I think the idea holds plenty of promise. I just think this is a terrible "extreme-sports star turned secret agent" movie. In fact, I'm kind of mad that the movie squanders both the concept and the talents of Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, and Asia Argento.

The Ghost Rider comic was never what you'd call high-concept, so I wasn't expecting much from the movie adaptation. But I was disappointed even in my low expectations. There's so little substance to this movie that I spent half my time watching being sad that Nicolas Cage and Sam Elliott are obviously working so hard to try to make their characters half-way believable.

So this last weekend I was supposed to do 8 miles for my long run and I was a little worried about fitting it in, because I knew that my schedule was pretty full in Utah over most of the weekend. As well, I was concerned about the heat and elevation in Salt Lake City, to which worries commenter Justin added hazy air from fires. Justin was not just supplying problems, however, but solutions as well and suggested that I run at the Olympic Oval. The Oval looks awesome, but it's a ways out of town and we were relying on our hosts to ferry us around -- I felt a bit weird about asking someone to get up early, drop me off at the Oval and then pick up a very sweaty me a few hours later.

So, when I got up Friday morning and saw that temperature was still only 80° and I knew we didn't have to be anywhere until noon, I decided to seize the moment and I suited up, grabbed a bottle of water*, and headed up into the hills above the University of Utah campus.

For the first few minutes I was gasping for breath and I was worried that that it was the altitude. Then I realized it was because I was running straight uphill and Chicago-running hasn't prepared me for anything more than a slight incline. As soon as possible I headed along a hill and the run got a lot easier.

In the end, it was an awesome run. I walked plenty, especially any uphill parts, but I ran plenty, too. Up in the hills, it was gorgeous -- I actually took my little camera along and took a bunch of pictures, and then somehow lost the camera in the hotel room. [Update: found it.]

I've now trained in 3 states for this marathon (well, Arizona barely counts, since I ran a whole mile there), but Kenner has me beat with his Paris and Dublin runs.

Update: Camera found.

* I'm glad I planned that far ahead, but I realize that running along the lakefront has totally spoiled me about the availabilty of water fountains.

But we weren't just in Utah to go running (nor just to eat) -- Greg and I, and Jose from Phoenix, were there to teach two groups of Utah improvisors how to do the Neutrino Project and then help them perform a show each. We also did a performance of The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard.

I was really impressed with the two casts. We had blocked out 8 hours of rehearsal for each cast (and they had previously rehearsed with Joe and Jesse from Jokyr and Jesster, working on general concepts like working in pairs, in the real world, and thinking about where the camera was) but we were able to let both casts go early. And both shows were really good. Friday night we had one SLC shooter, Logan Rogan, who's a film student and really took to the format, pulling out some great shots under the time constraint. Saturday night the whole show was really tight. I'm digitizing both shows and I'll share them as soon as I get them tidied up.

I was a little worried about Sickest Stories -- part of what makes the show a show instead of just people reciting their stories to the audience is the sense of intimacy that comes from the veneer that these are friends playing poker in someone's house. The 'theater' space at the University was awesome for the Neutrino Project, but I thought it might be a bit sterile for SFSIEH. As well, we couldn't drink (other than pop) or smoke. The show, I'm happy to report, turned out fine. Jesse asked the small audience to move to the first few rows, the lights came down, and we really talked like friends. I don't think anyone got out a real lengthly story, but we bickered and shared much like we really liked each other :-)

Friday we had the whole day off and Greg and I walked down from the Guest House, where we were staying, to downtown, taking pictures along the way. I think it's the first time I've been out for a walk with another photographer. Usually I feel bad for my walking companions, because I'm always stopping to take a picture of some dumb little thing. Greg, not so much, because he was taking pictures of the same dumb things.

Thanks to the Slapstick Association for bringing us out, Joe for organizing everything, Jose for driving all the way from Phoenix by himself (and bringing the Phoenix MagicBox(tm), Heather for feeding us a home-cooked meal, and all the actors and runners for giving their all to the shows.

<a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7842668096111383022&pr=goog-sl">click here to view video</a>

And speaking of Neutrino, the Phoenix Neutrino Project has finally posted the show that Shaun, Greg, and I sat in on during the Phoenix Improv Festival back in May. Prepare for some terrible overacting on my part. They've got a bunch of past shows in their Video Gallery.

When we saw 500 Clown Frankenstein last month, the Clowns used the text of the novel in a rather physical fashion. It made me realize that I had never read the original novel. So thanks to Dover Thrift Editions I soon had a copy for $2 (if you can stand to read on a PDA or computer screen, the novel is available for free from Project Gutenberg).

There are, as you might expect, a ton of differences between the original story and the Universal Studios movies that are most people's source for the Frankenstein story. And of course, it's the product of a different era. But I have to say that Victor Frankenstein's passivity and whininess drove me crazy.

I was impressed by one authorial trick -- the novel is narrated by a British explorer who is writing letters to his sister relating the stories that Victor Frankenstein is telling him (think about the layers of meta there for a second) and Frankenstein never actually says how he built a person. Since it turned out to be such a mistake, he doesn't want anyone else to try, he says. But it's a delightful bit of hand-waving that prevents Mary Shelley from having to explain how it actually would work. (Unlike the movies, there doesn't seem to be any electricity or dead bodies involved, though. He just builds a man from scratch. Interestingly, after he's already built a working man he needs to go consult some English scientists when he's trying to build a woman -- evidently lady parts are different.)

I'm not sure if I need to tell y'all about every single one of my weekend training runs -- but on the other hand, if I can't blather along on my own blog, where can I blather along?

This weekend was 10 miles -- my first foray into double digits. Matt Larsen came along for the run and was a delightful companion -- even when our slightly irregular route meant we'd finished ten miles with nearly a mile to go before we got home and he convinced me to keep on pushing and run that extra 8/10 of a mile. Even then he was delightful. Hated, but delightful.

I've been trying out a sampler pack of power gels on these longer runs, eating one somewhere after 5 miles. This week I had a pack of chocolate-flavored gel and I don't think I'll be eating that flavor again. I love chocolate, but that heavy taste just sat in my mouth for the next mile or so. Blech. I think I'll be sticking to the fruity flavors.

Oh, and again not to be a shill for the Nike+ thing, but they're pretty good at making you feel like a winner, whatever level you're running at. Unannounced, they just emailed me this certificate when my Nike+ mileage went over 100 miles. It's a nice little thing I can print out and put up next to my training calendar in the office. I have no idea what the next milestones are, and I kinda don't want to know so that they'll just be happy surprises.

Puzzle Quest is a rather frustrating game: the graphics are terrible and the game is buggy and crashed frequently* -- a rarity for a console game. But it's also incredibly addictive. There's a veneer of an RPG game bolted onto Bejeweled as a battle mechanic (and item-forging, spell-researching, etc. mechanic). Something about the near-mindless pattern matching combined with the "I'm making progress" of the RPG system combined to keep me (and Erica) playing the game for months. When I hit a brickwall at the final boss, even after completing all the side-quests, Erica helped me grind through enough battles to get enough gold to improve my stats to the point where I could beat Bane. And now that the game is finished, Erica is still playing to finish researching all the spells.

I did have a pet peeve with the intersection of the story and game mechanic. It was incredibly unrealistic that you could capture and control entire cities and it didn't affect your relationship with the inhabitants at all. I realize I'm making that complant about a game where this is high battle, but still.

* Fortunately the game auto-saves after battles, otherwise it would have been thrown out the window in frustration.

Near the end of the Friday workshop/rehearsal in Salt Lake City we were running out of time before we were going to be kicked out of the space and so I sent the crews out to film three 2-minute scenes as quickly as they could. Each crew had a prop to inspire their scenes and the direction to try to give their scenes an arc of a beginning, middle, and end. I sent Logan Rogan, Joe Rogan, and Danny McDonnall off with a bag of Southwest Airlines peanuts and this what they came back with...

I was feeling pretty good near the end of my run this morning, so I decided to "sprint" and I ended up doing a new personal best for the mile -- Lance Armstrong told me so. 9'06" (down from 9'53"). Chariots of What? Yeah, that's right.

I usually run along the more westerly path to stick near the water fountains, but for the past couple of days I've been hugging the actual lake shore and this morning my 2.5 miles out got me to a little nature preserve dealie. I think I was on the outskirts of the Bill Jarvis Migratory Bird Sanctuary. It was a neat little break to run through the wild flowers and scrub. I saw some rabbits and the most crows (four) I've seen together in one place since the West Nile virus hit.

I read the first four Harry Potter books and then bought the fifth (i.e. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) while I was in Scotland in 2004. I promptly never read it. But now that the last book is out, I figured I'd better finish up the series quick before all the shocking revelations were just out there in the zeitgeist. As Penny Arcade and Threadless* have noted, there's a statue of limitations on spoilers.

So, you know, pretty good for the cliched kind of wizardy young adult lit that it is. And hey, I did like sweetkealoha and found out which House I'm in:

* In fact, I just noticed that there's a sixth-book spoiler on that shirt.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

Just speechless.

(via Whatever)

(Again, the original photo by La Shinda Clark.)

Photo by Erica.

Please feel free to tune out immediately if you have no interest in the behind-the-scenes organization of this site. Look! There's an lolcat just below this post!

OK, so I've changed the ordering of the category archives so that they descend in reverse-chronological order, just like the main page. That seems to make sense, so that if you wanted to, say, keep up on just my running adventures you could book mark that category page and check for changes by looking at the top of the page*. The question, though, is about the monthly archive pages. If you were reading those pages, for whatever reason, you'd probably want to go in chronological order, but maybe should they be in reverse-chrono order just for consistency?

Oh, and I think I'm going to do that thing where the category pages only have the full text of a post for the, say, 10 or 20 most recent posts and after that they're just exerpts. It should speed things up for posting, I guess -- do any of my regular readers actually use the category pages?

* Of course, you can always subscribe to the FuzzyCo RSS or Atom feed in your newsreader or recent browser and always be up-to-date on all FuzzyCo goings-on.

Erica found my little camera this morning, so I was able to retrieve the photos from my run in Salt Lake City. I've added them in to my set of photos from the SLC trip, starting here.

Oddly, because of the circumstances, it's hard to think of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as anything except a prelude to the final book, which I'm about to start. I suppose it'd be different if I had to wait a year for the next one instead of five minutes.

S'true -- I'm too tired to type more than the distance for a title.

I was going to run with Matt Larsen again this morning, but I guess he's hurt his ankle (my cell phone was a little hard to hear when I was listening to the message, so I hope that's accurate) and wants to rest it, which is entirely reasonable. I ran pretty much the route we ran last week and whole enterprise felt just a little better than last week. This week does still fall into the category "imagine how easy this will feel when I get enough rest and eat right" -- I had a show last night in the suburbs and didn't really eat dinner. I found myself at 11 pm in a gas station about to make the drive home, trying to figure out what snack food I could eat that would help me carbo-load without having too much fat. I'm not advocating Nutter Butters, but that's what I got.

Oh, and I ran out of my power gel thingies and didn't have a chance to get more. (And the stupid kiosk right near the turn-around point doesn't open until 10 am.) I was thinking of getting a case of Crank e-gels, partly because they have free shipping and then I wouldn't have to run an errand this week. Yes, says the man who just ran 11 miles, I'm that lazy. Anyone have any particular love/hate relationships with any brand of energy gel?

Seriously. I'm on like page 280 of 6000 and I keep almost catching glimpses of discussions on the internet. I knew that if I was going to read this last book with any sense of surprise, I'd have to read it quick before the plot was just out there in the zeitgeist. Soon, I'll bet you, people will be using events from the book as examples in pop culture, just because so many people have read it that it'll be a cultural touchstone. (Or maybe I'm over-estimating the influence of a bunch of 12-year-olds and nerds.)

Erica and I got married a year ago, on July 29, 2006. We celebrated by taking a day (and-a-half) trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

July 29, 2006 was also the day that my friend Anna Dufair died. She is missed.

Kenosha, Wisconsin is perfect for a day- or overnight-trip from Chicago. It's only an hour and a half away, but seems to be far enough away that it doesn't just feel like you're driving out to a suburb (sorry, Waukegan). There seems to be about a day-and-a-half worth of stuff to do and it's an easy drive back.

This is not, by any means, an extensively researched treatise -- we did the barest amount of planning and jumped in the car. If I've missed some awesome treasure of Kenosha, don't be offended, just let us all know in the comments.

The highlight of the trip for us was a trip to Frank's Diner (508-58th Street, Kenosha). I'm not ashamed to admit that I found out about Frank's from an episode of the Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and that just maybe it was the impetus for the whole trip. Fortunately, Frank's lives up to the hype. The Garbage Plate is an incredible amount of food, and Erica contends that it's more than the sum of its parts. We also had the French Toast made with their homemade bread and it was both hearty and delicious. Frank's is an original 1926 diner car and current owners seem to be proud of that history without being precious about it -- it's a working diner and the primary concern seems to be feeding people large quantities of good food. Frank's closes at 2 pm and fills up pretty quick after 10 am or so on the weekends.

Kenosha is popular enough over the summer that all the hotels were booked up several weeks in advance. We decided to chance it and see if we could luck into a cancelation or something (at worst, it'd be a 90 minute drive back to sleep in our own beds). What we lucked into was the Park Ridge Inn (6121 75th St, Kenosha). On the plus side, they had a vacancy when no one else did, and it seems that room prices are somewhat negotiable, if you're a negotiator. You get what you pay for, however, and the room was a little musty and worn. And the "Free HBO" notice on the sign is a lie! We've definitely stayed in worse, though.

We had dinner our first night there at Villa de Carlo (5140 6th Ave, Kenosha). I've been assured by a former Kenoshan that they're known for their pizza. We did not have the pizza. We had bad pasta and an adequate spinach salad. Also, the decor looks like the garden section of a craft store threw up on the place.

There are lighthouses for staring at, and the lake to look out on (I know, it's the same lake we've got down here -- but up there it's a vacation lake), and ducks to throw bread crumbs. There are cozy coffee shops (with Intelligentsia coffee!) and a number of museums, if you're into that sort of thing.

On your way home, the Mars' Cheese Castle is in Kenosha, out on 94, for all of your sausages-shaped-like-beer-bottles and Wisconsin-fruit-wine needs.

It might just be a coincidence or the sections of town we were passing through, but it seemed as if almost everything business in town was named after the owner. As in, it wasn't the Something Diner, it was Frank's Diner. Carolyn's Coffee Connection. Mac's Deli. Is there some town ordinance that requires the owner's name in the business name, or people in Kenosha just really proud of their accomplishments?

(Originally published on the Chicago Metblog.)

Our dear Wisconsin friends at Leinenkugel's have a new summer brew showing up in bottles and at bars that have "Leinekugel's Seasonal" on the menu -- the Summer Shandy. Leine's are making their Shandy as a wheat beer with "lemonade flavor". Erica and I have been drinking and enoying it, especially on these recent scorchers, but it was reminding me of the Shandies I had as a youth* in Australia.

In my recollection, the Shandy in Australia was half beer and half English-style lemonade, which is halfway between American lemonade and Sprite. And a quick peek at the Wikipedia entry for Shandy showed that around the world a Shandy can be just about any kind of soft drink mixed in with beer. Perhaps the biggest difference between that style of Shandy and Leine's premade one is that the mixed ones dilute the alcohol, which means that on a hot summer day, you can drink more of them without getting quite so sloshed**.

So the only thing for it was to pick up a bunch of Shandy fixin's and have an old-fashioned Shandy taste-off.

Since we were comparing to Leine's Summer Shandy, I wanted a comparable beer without the lemonade flavor and so I grabbed some Leine's Sunset Wheat***. All the Shandies were half-beer and half-mixer:

We started out with some solid American lemonade: Simply Lemonade-brand:
Fuzzy: Smooth, light, very refreshing and almost frighteningly drinkable.
Erica: Awesome and delicious.

I thought R.W. Knudsen Spritzer Jamaican Lemonade might be something like the Austalian lemonade I was remembering (but it's not):
Erica: Tastes more artifical -- I'd rather just drink the spritzer.
Fuzzy: Pretty weak and watered-down.

The Wikipedia entry had mentioned a number of variations of ginger ale or ginger beer, so we thought we'd try Canada Dry Ginger Ale:
Erica: Like watered-down beer.
Fuzzy: Yeah, also pretty weak.

Since regular ginger ale seemed too weak, we tried some Sprecher Ginger Ale, which claims on the bottle that it's "icy-cool and spicy-hot with real ginger". In fact, by itself the Sprecher Ginger Ale doesn't have that strong of a ginger kick and it isn't much better mixed with beer:
Erica: Maybe it'd taste good with some fruit in it. It's a little bitter.
Fuzzy: Blah.

I'm a big fan of Limeade, so why not:
Erica: I'd rather drink Limeade on its own without messing it up with beer.
Fuzzy: The lime doesn't mesh as well with the beer as the lemon did.

Another entry in the maybe-it's-like-English-lemonade was Trader Joe's French Market Pink Lemonade:
Erica: Uh-oh, this might be my favorite. It's sweet and fizzy. Plus, anything pink you can't go wrong with.
Fuzzy: I'll give it a close second after the regular lemonade.

After trying all those variations, we gave the Leine's Summer Shandy another taste and frankly it came up short:
Erica: Huh, this is now my least favorite. It's kind of bitter.
Fuzzy: Weird, I really liked it yesterday.

So, the regular lemonade and the Trader Joe's fizzy pink lemonade were both favorites. And if the weather stays this hot, I think we'll be drinking plenty of both.

* By youth I mean 18, and that was legal for bars there. So there.
** That may, of course, be a positive or a negative for you.
***After all our tasting was over, I noticed that the label described it as "beer with natural flavors". WTF? Flavors? The whole test is ruined and we'll have to conduct it again (and again and again)!

(Originally posted on the Chicago Metblog: Shandy!)